australind wanderings in western australia and the malay east

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III First Night in the BushChorus of Bull-frogsProwling Dingoes The Break-o'-day BoyThe Morning Pipe" Yahbagee" End of LambingA Good IncreaseA Tramp through the BushWild FlowersThe Shearing SeasonA Stroll with the GunOnly an Ants' NestThe Reward of Curiosity Notes on the West Australian AntsCockatoosAdieu to Nibi-NibiFanning on the GreeuoughDescription of the StripperThe Cockatoo Farmer. THE novelty of the situation prevented my sleeping until far into the night. Here was I for the first time stretched out on the bare ground, wrapped in a coarse horse-rug, and with no other covering than the brilliantly star-lit southern sky. For hours I was contemplating the thickly spangled sky, which was alight with many splendid constellations common to both hemispheres, but which, here to the southward, seemed to be strangely inverted. The clearness of the atmosphere rendered visible to the naked eye nebula? which are difficult to distinguish in our foggy and smoky England. The great nebula in Orion shone with a brilliancy I had never before witnessed, except at sea perhaps in mid- ocean, and the Milky-Way gleamed with sharply defined outlines unknown to dwellers in the far north. My reveries were not long undisturbed, however, for a dismal long-drawn-out howl, apparently emanating from a range of iron-stone hills distant about a mile from the camp, broke on the stillness around me, and was taken up and repeated in various directions, soon becoming an excruciating chorus in all the dreary and woeful notes the canine throat is capable of. This I readily guessed to be the howl of the nocturnal native wild dog, or dingo, the scourge of the sheep farmer. Then other " voices of the night" broke out near home. A bull-frog in the adjacent " yangit" swamp croone... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.